Theater on the green: Staging eco-minded productions in SD

Seema Sueko (shown at Miramar Recycling Center) and her theater company Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company have been at the forefront of developing strategies to reduce waste and other environmental impacts from the construction and disposal of used theater scenery.

K.C. Alfred

Seema Sueko (shown at Miramar Recycling Center) and her theater company Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company have been at the forefront of developing strategies to reduce waste and other environmental impacts from the construction and disposal of used theater scenery.

Seema Sueko (shown at Miramar Recycling Center) and her theater company Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company have been at the forefront of developing strategies to reduce waste and other environmental impacts from the construction and disposal of used theater scenery. (K.C. Alfred)

Mo’olelo’s 2008 production of “Permanent Collection.” — NICK ABADILLA Bruce Cartier, at the entrance of his at-home performance space with his dog, Springer — was staging green-conscious theater before it was chic. His “no-budget circus” productions in Barrio Logan make use of discards and Craigslist freebies. — Earnie Grafton / Union-Tribune

Green is the shade of the heroine’s skin in the massive Broadway hit “Wicked.” Green is also the color of the currency “Wicked” continues to haul in — some $1.3 million a week, more than six years after the show’s New York premiere.

But green also has come to mean something more than cold cash to the people behind that showbiz phenom and other hot-ticket Broadway shows. And at least a bit of the credit can go to a San Diego theater whose $168,000 yearly budget doesn’t match what “Wicked” makes in a day.

Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company puts on just two productions a year, each focusing on a specific social issue, from gun violence to racism to brain injury. Besides rolling out a wide array of educational efforts with every show, the community-minded company also has embraced the idea of reducing live theater’s environmental impact in general, devoting special attention to how sets are designed and discarded.

“We create these elaborate worlds,” as Mo’olelo co-founder and artistic director Seema Sueko puts it. “But what do we do with it all at the end?”

Mo’olelo won a grant from the national Theatre Communications Group in 2008 to develop a comprehensive green-theater “tool kit.” But while Sueko and Co. were working on that, a newly launched New York consortium called the Broadway Green Alliance, which was developing its own green-theater initiatives, happened to run across a set of working guidelines on the Mo’olelo Web site.

Now, Mo’olelo’s work (the company posted its finished tool kit in December) is being used as a model by the Broadway producers, administrators and technical people who have signed on to the Alliance.

“Part of the goal of the Broadway Green Alliance was not to reinvent the wheel, but to get out there and link up people to resources,” says Susan Sampliner, company manager of “Wicked” on Broadway and a co-chair of the BGA. “And we thought Mo’olelo had a fantastic set of resources, so we just leaned on them. And they were very gracious about it.”

Live theater likely doesn’t register in most minds as being particularly harmful to the planet. It’s not coal mining; at its most threatening it seems more likely to imperil delicate sensibilities than fragile ecosystems.

But a show can have a surprising variety of non-green components: potentially toxic paints, energy-intensive electronics, non-recyclable foams and fabrics, even Spandex can be a no-no, because of the way it’s manufactured. And then there are such aspects as how the audience (and equipment) gets to the theater in the first place.

Community, Sueko says, is “the starting point for all we do” at Mo’olelo, so she felt a sense of hypocrisy about being part of a theater world that prides itself on being socially conscious and yet knows that “the methods of theater are damaging.”

Mo’olelo’s latest show, Robert Farid Karimi’s hip-hop piece “self (the remix),” now in previews at the Tenth Avenue Theatre downtown, is physically about as green as can be. It has no set to speak of — mainly just Karimi and DJ D Double.

While Sueko says that wasn’t the prime reason for picking the show, she adds that “knowing we didn’t have to truck in a bunch of scenery and damage the environment that way was appealing.”

To Sueko, if theater isn’t as green as it could be, the reason has more to do with a lack of information than of will. That’s been the point of publicizing the tool kit, which offers detailed environmental “score cards” on everything from wood products to textiles to “audience interface materials” (playbills, food containers, shade-grown organic coffees).

“I think everybody wants to do the right thing when it comes to the environment,” she says. “But it’s hard to know what the right thing is.”

It turns out that going green can also save some of that other green. Sampliner of “Wicked” says the first step the Broadway company took was to start using rechargeable batteries instead of disposables to power the show’s abundance of wireless microphones and backstage flashlights.

“We had used huge amounts of batteries,” Sampliner says. “We’d put them in buckets and tell people to take them home — they were only partly used, because you didn’t want them to cut out in the middle of a show.”

No one wants Elphaba’s voice to go silent at the climax of “Defying Gravity,” which was part of the reason there was a reluctance to use rechargeables in the first place; the fear was they wouldn’t have enough staying power. Not only did that concern prove unfounded, but the switch is now saving the company $26,000 a year.

Many shades of green

Locally, Mo’olelo isn’t alone in its green thinking. J*Company Youth Theatre, based in University City, rolled out an Earth-minded season last year that included reusing paints and sets, tracking all materials in and out to reduce waste, and educating cast and crew on good environmental practices.

And although Bruce Cartier of the Technomania Circus was following a kind of religion of reuse long before green became chic, the thinking behind his company’s inventive sets fits into the new, low-impact consciousness.

Cartier likes to invoke the word “obtanium” to describe the mishmash of found objects he uses to create the worlds of Technomania’s whimsical, unpredictable productions. They take place at the Center for the Amusing Arts, an outdoor performance space constructed on Cartier’s property in Barrio Logan.

Cartier developed his sensibility growing up in the desert town of Ocotillo Wells, watching his father “put together things in weird ways to help them run.”

Technomania, he notes, is “a no-budget circus, trying to make something out of nothing. So stuff that people throw away can still be used. To me, a lot of that stuff is still valuable.

“(Assembling things) in the wrong way, in a different way — I love that kind of spirit,” he says.

Cartier finds his materials discarded in alleyways or advertised as freebies on Craigslist. He has managed to round up enough metal to construct an 8-foot-tall UFO for Technomania’s next production, a spoofy alien romp that opens March 20.

Cartier also notes that Technomania is located right next to a stop on the trolley’s Orange Line.

Transportation is likewise an aspect of Mo’olelo’s green mission; the company offers $5 discount coupons via e-mail to theatergoers who get to the show by carpooling, driving a hybrid, bicycling or using public transportation.

That’s not such an issue on Broadway, where most theaters are located within a few blocks of a subway stop. But the theaters there are finding other ways to chip away at their environmental impact.

Sampliner says that within the space of a single year, nearly all the bulbs on Broadway marquees were switched from incandescent to LED lights or other more energy-efficient types.

On the question, though, of whether better choices for the environment might lead to artistic compromises, Sampliner says it’s too early to say. With the long lead times of the typical Broadway show, there hasn’t been much opportunity for productions to incorporate green thinking from the earliest conceptual stages.

“At this point, we realize a lot of our designers don’t know what the greener choices are,” Sampliner says. One good sign, she says, is that she now gets frequent calls from other theaters asking what steps they should take.

Sueko likewise doesn’t expect instant results, especially when theaters lately have had to focus so much energy on simple survival. The rich tradition of theater, the way so much of it is still handmade, also means old ways can be slow to evolve.

“As progressive as we think of theater as being, it’s hard to change the way things have always been done,” Sueko says. “We’re very green at being green.”